Today’s Post has a feature on Bit o’ Lit, a recently launched magazine, stocked in free boxes near Metro stations, that assembles excerpts from recently published books. Founder Shannon MacDonald has clearly hit on a good (if not yet profitable) idea with her condensed Readers Digest Condensed Books concept, though a bit toward the end had me softly sobbing in my coffee:

One of the things MacDonald remains adamant about is that the magazine will not include reviews. She maintains that people have such different tastes that they should be able to judge the books for themselves.

“A good portion of the population . . . does not read book reviews, because there is no common language to talk about writing,” she said. “Someone could say ‘This is the best book in the world!’ and that could mean nothing to me.”

Local critic and litblogger Bethanne Patrick has a few thoughts on the matter.